Wearable computing faces an uphill battle breaking through to the mainstream, new data shows.

Smartwatches are only half as popular as fitness bands in the UK - but neither has yet gone beyond the “early adopter” stage, according to data from the research company KWP ComTech.

In all there are 426,000 smartwatches currently owned in Great Britain, the company says, meaning that less than 1% of the population owns one.

Of those owners, 72% (306,000) are male, 56% (238,000) are aged under 35 and 34% (145,000) live in London.

By contrast, fitness bands such as the Nike Fuelband, Fitbit One or Shine are more widely used with 1.8% penetration, representing about 1 million owners.

Of the smartwatch owners, KWP ComTech says that Samsung had the leading share, with 32% (136,000), followed by Sony on 21% (89,000) and the Kickstarter-funded Pebble on 18% (77,000).

Samsung’s promotional efforts last year with its Galaxy Gear may have helped it to that position, suggests Dominic Sunnebo, global consumer insight director at KWP. Despite the product being poorly reviewed, “it got to the stage where Samsung was giving away the Galaxy Gear for free with sales of the Galaxy Note [phablet],” he told the Guardian.

He is confident that the data is robust: “we asked our panel of 15,000 people, representative of the UK population, and those are the numbers that came from it.” The company only looked at the UK in Europe because “we think that the UK is going to be the market with the highest penetration for these”.

The popularity of fitness bands likely grows from the fact that “people are willing to spend money on it - it’s becoming incredibly popular in the UK after the Olympics. These days rather than buying a motorbike, the mid-life crisis for many men involves squeezing into sports gear - they’re called MAMILs, or middle-aged men in lycra.”